


In Darkness Enveloped

by anneapocalypse



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Cunnilingus, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:28:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28752180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: The Conclave is destroyed. The Divine is dead. The Left Hand and Right Hand are at odds, and at loose ends. It's the worst of times. It's certainly the worst possible time for this.
Relationships: Leliana/Cassandra Pentaghast
Comments: 15
Kudos: 21
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	In Darkness Enveloped

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ghost_teeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/gifts).



Haven stinks of ash and death. It clings to Cassandra, a fine dust over her breastplate, a grit in her teeth. She hasn't had a chance to wash since the explosion, but she suspects it wouldn't make a difference. It hangs in the air, sticks to her like an ichor.

She wonders if Kirkwall smelled like this, after the blast, when debris rained down over the City of Chains. By the time they arrived, the dust was settled, the souls of the dead commended to the side of the Maker. The Champion long gone. Nightingale's talons made quick work of the lock at the Hawke estate, only to find a home left to dust, not even a groundskeeper to greet them.

Haven's ashes still smolder.

Yet once again, they were too late. Too late, in the wrong place, one step behind. Left to bear witnessed to the destruction, peace consumed in magic fire.

Nightingale's approach is near-silent, but Cassandra has learned to hear the soft steps of the Left Hand, and does not startle. Without turning, she says, "Any change?"

"None." The heavy door closes and Cassandra turns, at last, to face her. Candlelight glints in Nightingale's eyes, half-shadowed by her hood. "We must consider the possibility that the prisoner will not awaken."

Cassandra lets out a harsh laugh. "I suppose that would save us the trouble of an execution."

"We may need her, Cassandra."

"We have no idea if what she has done can be undone."

"We do not know for certain that she did it."

They know nothing for certain, and it is _that_ which makes Cassandra's every limb seize, makes her blood thunder for some foe to engage her sword and shield, something that can be _defeated._ She means to respond, means to say _Who else, then?_ But what comes forth is a snarl of frustration. "We should have been there. We should have been there, at Most Holy's side—"

A look of pain flashes lightning-quick in Leliana's eyes. Just as quickly gone. You could think you'd mistaken it. Perhaps she has. Cassandra is sure of nothing.

"I know," Leliana says, her voice steel-edged. The affirmation is no comfort.

Cassandra turns. Maybe she means to leave, to step outside, to walk pointlessly down to the dungeon to stare pointlessly at their unconscious suspect with that unholy glow burning a hole in her palm.

Maker's mercy, they know nothing of the prisoner—not who she was, which side she stood for. Nightingale, ever calculating, is of course correct. They need the prisoner, not only for what that blighted mark on her hand may do, but for what she may be able to tell them.

Most Holy's murderer. The murderer of thousands.

The storm in her breast overwhelms her, and whatever Cassandra had meant to do next, what she does is slam her gauntleted fist into the wall beside the door. The impact rattles the whole little room, and something on a shelf falls over.

"Yes, hit things," Leliana says, and her voice is cold. "That will fix everything."

"What do you want from me, Leliana?" Cassandra wheels, expecting steel in the spymaster's eyes. Instead there is a startled look, fleeting as the flutter of wings. Just for a moment.

What they want, what either of them wanted, has always come second. They are Left Hand and Right Hand, the will of the Divine carried out upon the world. Instruments of a will gone silent.

She knows of the heresies Leliana once spoke, when she was a young sister in Lothering. Leliana no longer speaks of such things, though the whispers still follow her.

Where is the voice of their Maker now? What would Leliana say, if Cassandra asked?

She does not wait for a reply, but stalks out, letting the door slam shut behind her and her footsteps fall heavy as she crosses the length of the empty sanctuary.

She regrets herself as soon as the night air hits her face. _Petulant, childish, hotheaded._ All the charges leveled at her younger self, and none without merit. She overheard Nightingale refer to her once as a _blunt instrument._ When she thought Cassandra wasn't listening. Or perhaps—more likely—when she knew she was.

It wasn't wrong. It still stung.

The mountain air is still. That scent of ash and burned flesh is even thicker with no wind. The moons hang off-balance in the sky, one high and one low, and between them blazes the sickly green glow of that tear in the sky. Some feeling sits heavy in Cassandra's stomach, one she cannot describe.

Her own words have never come easily to her. Far easier in times of trial to call to mind the words of the Chant, verses that have given her solace in times past. She breathes in the night, the cold, the scent of death, and struggles to call to mind those words, grasps to feel something that might be called comfort.

 _I cannot see the path._  
_Perhaps there is only abyss._  
_Trembling, I step forward_ _…_

But she cannot see the next step.

_Maker, though the darkness comes upon me,_  
_I shall embrace the Light. I shall weather the storm._  
_I shall endure._  
_What you have created, no one can tear asunder._

Cassandra looks at the sky, torn asunder.

She turns and goes in out of the moonlight, back into the dark and quiet of the Chantry.

Something stirs near the high arched ceiling as Cassandra steps back inside, like a flutter of wings. Bats, perhaps, or one of Nightingale's ravens. She steps lighter, her temper cooled, but her footfalls still echo, announcing her return. Giving Leliana all the warning she needs to vanish.

Yet she feels her companion's presence even as she nudges open the door at the back of the sanctuary—Leliana still standing half in shadow, back to the wall, arms crossed. The light of the single candle burning on the table dances along her jaw, her lips.

Cassandra opens her mouth to apologize for her outburst, and Leliana's chin lifts slightly, and before Cassandra can speak, she says, "You should sleep."

Sleep sounds like something from another life, a world with hope of peace, where it might be right to lay down your blade and your burdens for a time and rest. Once, Cassandra kept vigil in fasting and solitude, emptying the vessel of her soul to be touched by the Maker. Once, she walked through dark and silence, knowing there was light at the end of her path. _Though all before me is shadow, yet shall the Maker be my guide._

This night feels like a vigil with no end.

Cassandra closes the door firmly behind her, and sighs. "I cannot."

Leliana steps out of her corner, and the candlelight touches her eyes, cold and inscrutable. "Nor can I."

Whatever she meant to say has flown from her mind, and Cassandra turns and leans half-sitting against the wooden table. Though sleep is unimaginable, she feels impossibly heavy.

Nightingale moves at the corner of her eye, into the circle of candlelight. The hood falls away and her eyes are suddenly blue, so blue, as the heart of a flame. Flickering close enough for warmth, or danger.

Strange to see her so close, in the light. Stranger still to recognize the cold tracks of tears gleaming on her face. For a moment Cassandra is lost in the strangeness, familiar and foreign like the paths one walks in dreams. She is unsure which comes first, Leliana's body blocking hers against the table or Leliana's mouth pressed against her own.

It is not tender. Not rough or cruel, but this is no courtship, and if a part of Cassandra wishes it were, she crushes that thought down harder than the kiss she returns. That sheer, bottomless loneliness in Leliana's eyes has imprinted itself upon Cassandra's mind and remains, long after Leliana's eyes and hers have closed.

They break breathless, and if there were a moment to halt this, to say that this is neither the time nor the place, that this will solve nothing, fix nothing, and likely come to no damned good, this would be the moment.

She does not.

Instead she pinches out the candle with two fingers, and lets Leliana push her down on the long table.

Nightingale's hands are deft in the dark. No less than Cassandra expected, but it is another thing to be intimately acquainted with them. Bard's hands, bowstring-strong but smooth and pretty as a noblewoman's, fit to be seen at court.

She wonders, briefly, if her own sword-calloused touch would satisfy so well. Only briefly. Mostly, she gazes up at the near-black ceiling and gasps and trembles, stifling her cries though there is no one near enough to hear them. Leliana responds to the tilt of her hips, the quickening of her breath, and brings Cassandra to a peak that leaves her breathless, shivering. The sweat cools all too quickly on her skin, but she feels a flush lingering in her cheeks.

Cassandra hooks her hands around Leliana's thighs then and pulls her forward, until she kneels over Cassandra's face. Her sharp poleyns dig into the wood of the table on either side as Cassandra tugs her trousers down her thighs, and her light mail falls like a curtain all about Cassandra's face.

She puts her mouth to work, more clumsily than Leliana no doubt, but neither is Cassandra without experience, and she draws a moan from her partner louder than she herself would have dared.

She clings to Leliana's hips, the solidness of her form an odd comfort, and every cry Leliana utters as she crests shuddering at Cassandra's touch becomes a victory.

Foolish, but in that moment it feels true.

Silence lingers after, but for their heavy breaths.

"Cassandra—" Leliana says at last, almost gentle—almost as though this meant something more than desperation. For a moment, Cassandra wants to speak her name back to her, wants to breathe some word of solace they can share. For what else have they to share but despair?

But she's never been good at finding words.

Instead she does up her trousers again, and Leliana sets her mail aright. A strike of tinder lights the candle again, bathing the room in soft yellow light. But Nightingale has raised her hood, casting her eyes in shadow. Cassandra runs her hand over the table's surface, feeling where the surface is marred from Leliana's poleyns—Maker's mercy, someone clever enough could probably deduce from those marks what happened here, she'll have to put something over it.

Cassandra opens the door, but hesitates in the threshold, staring across the empty sanctuary as far as that little light will go, as though the answers are out there somewhere.

Even Leliana cannot drive the taste of ashes from her mouth.


End file.
